Pages

Saturday, April 19, 2014

We are at that time of the year when the coolness of Hyderabad winter has given way to the heat and dryness of summer, and just as one must take care when it turns cool at the end of the year, one must take care now. Stay out of the sun as much as you can, and drink water frequently. I know you wonder why I have not written you for so long. I trust you looked up my other blog to see what was going on with me. The good thing is that I know that you will figure things out, and correctly, and that our intent to be whole and happy will manifest no matter what chooses to stand in its way.

One of the struggles that I had in writing you in these recent months was the fact that you are growing older, and that your questions are changing, and you need honest answers. Truth, love, attachment – these are funny things. While on one hand truth is beautiful and eternal, on the other, it is like a river that washes you clean, perhaps more brusquely than you would like. That washing clean can sometimes compel you to rethink and review what you believe. This rebuilding of one’s worldview, liberating and exhilarating as it is, often comes with a lot of pain and disillusionment. Love makes you long for the growth and happiness of the person or thing you love yet it hesitates when that growth implies pain. Attachment, like love, can sometimes stop you from doing the right thing, because doing the right thing might result in temporary suffering for the person (or thing) you cling to. It takes a lot of conviction, courage and strength to do the right thing especially when it causes pain in the immediate future. I am grateful for the blessings of that strength, and I am certain you will find it too.

That is not the only reason I did not get to write you on this blog. Like many good daddy bloggers, I too have often set out but have not got far, and a lot of what I wrote went into the never-neverland that is the drafts folder. The time is gone when we could do the babysaurus moos and the hand jive and come away feeling fulfilled. You have started learning that neither the finger nor what it points at are the real thing. The signs are everywhere. By the time you become a grown man, these things will be forgotten, but these are truly times of manifesting change. There will be mistakes along the way and we will have to learn to acknowledge our humanness, but we will also see how man is capable of redeeming himself and that he is worthy of the gift of evolution. We will take pride in our civilization. These are not easy things to believe in when you look around you, but faith is never easy. It is tested and abused repeatedly, and with good reason, since it is through this battering that it gains its power and magnificence.

The last four decades saw the world redefining itself a few times over, but almost entirely in the context of economics and trade. Technology grew at a rapid pace, and there were cycles of what we call boom periods when the economy brisked up. Every boom is typically accompanied by a bust, so we saw a few of those too. Along with this, there was the end of communism as we knew it. Our education system teaches us to think in binaries, in pairs, in opposites. We were taught to believe that the opposite of communism was capitalism. Capitalism (like Hinduism and Buddhism) is faith in the principle of capital. If you had capital (which commonly means money and property), you were valuable. If you didn’t, you were still of value, in the potential you had to earn capital. Communism, very broadly, is about being comme une, or like one, and treating resources and mankind as if we were one big family. Big families have their own problems, so it wasn’t too long before it fell through. It tried a little to fit in with the times, and you had various shades of socialism and euro-communism, but none of it stood a chance when compared to the glamorous, all-lit-up allure of capital.